Horizontal wood patterns and white wave textures are this year’s exploding trends.
As artisan craft has given way to machine-made aesthetic, designers have embraced texture as a way to create visual interest. This new ornament including horizontal wood patterns and white wave textures are this year’s exploding trends. While these trends have been gaining momentum over the last several years in venues such as Longchamps’ SoHo store and McGraw Hill’s pocket park in mid-town, these trends are exploding with companies such as Modular Arts bringing panelized products to market that designers embrace to create visceral interest in many contexts.
Hand carved stone and wood ornament, a quintessential part of beaux-arts design of the nineteenth century, gave scale and meaning to the built environment. This old world textured ornament gave way to the minimalist planar surfaces of the twentieth century partly due to esthetic preferences but also due to the increasing cost of labor. As a result the knowledge base and craftsmanship to create such ornament has essentially been lost to history. Now we are seeing this rise of the texture and pattern taking over those ornamental and monolithic surfaces as designers are embracing newer materials created by CNC routers and injection molded forms. In the near future this trend will be augmented with a new form of computer generated customized ornament created by 3D printing technology just now emerging as a commercially viable technology. 
Bottom Line: Designers are always looking for new products, surfaces and finishes as a way to differentiate their projects from the past and their competitors. This drive, coupled with innovative companies embracing technology to produce visually stunning surfaces, provide inquisitive designers with a multitude of new products to explore.
Images: Hello Cupcake, DC; Yogurt Shop, San Francisco; Quintiles Pharmaceuticals, Durham.